Over the last few month, about a dozen new satellite galaxy candidates around the Milky Way have been discovered. Each new satellite acts as an important test of the Vast Polar Structure (VPOS), the plane of satellites rotating around our Galaxy. Today we put a preprint on the arXiv in which we show that the new objects align well with the VPOS, confirming my earlier work.

We also find that, even though the footprint of the Dark Energy Survey – the observational campaign which uncovered the majority of the new satellites – lies close to the VPOS, the alignment of the DES satellites with the VPOS is stronger than expected due to the footprint shape. We also predict the proper motions of the new satellites, assuming that they, like observed for the classical ones, preferentially orbit within the VPOS.

In addition we provide predictions for the velocity dispersions of the new objects under the assumption that they are either (1) dark-matter-free star clusters obeying Newtonian Dynamics, (2) dark-matter dominated dwarf galaxies following empirical scaling relations, or (3) that their dynamics follows MOND. These predictions are the main reason why we decided to publish the preprint before acceptance by a journal: we want to avoid that the measurements of the velocity dispersions become available before our predictions (which would make them look like post-dictions).